The Trouble With Bloggers

The trouble with Bloggers is that they aren't really writers. Don't get me wrong, some of them are quite good writers. Others couldn't write their way out of a paper bag, but we won't name names. Maybe the bad ones will get better with practice. Maybe the good ones will get book contracts, and that will encourage the middling writers. Maybe, as with water, everything will seek it's own level and that will be everyone's success.

But I still say that the trouble with Bloggers is that they aren't hard and fast, dedicated, in-for-the-kill lost-in-the-rush-and-flush-of-it writers. If they get depressed or busy or drunk or promoted or get too close to a case of the clap, they cease writing. Maybe just for a while, maybe longer. If they get a new car or a common cold or a rare disease or get irritated with the stock market or need a new job or can't remember their name in less than ten seconds, they simply stop writing. Adversity is too perverse for them.

I haven't been at it long enough to have seen how bloggers handle a death in the family. Does it become a blog subject, too? I'd like to think Not, but I expect to see it, nonetheless. Bloggers who continue to blog seem to use nearly everything else. If they can't think of any more good ideas to blog about, they at last desist. Wimps.

Yeah, wimps. But the problem is that I am one of them. By the size of that overloaded horse trailer out there in which I haul my whinnying ego around, you might guess which kind of writer I think I am. But still I'm just one of the rest who isn't being paid a dime for this, who does it for the love of it or for the inane companionship of it (there is some, now and then) or for the very insane hell of it (of which there is an appreciable amount).

Being the Internet denizen I've become, I probably read it in somebody's blog and not in the New York Times, but nonetheless I read a while back that the NYT said there are about 10 million blogs at the present time. I don't think there's one-tenth that number of good writers in the group. You don't either, do you? You can figure there are not that many geniuses in the group, either. Geniuses would be out saving the planet or else harvesting the Earth like the Japanese harvest a whale population. The geniuses would be doing Something, not writing about Nothing, as I am now. So, there's few of them in here with us. And though I've encountered some kind and considerate people, I wouldn't be too quick to guess that there are any saintly souls in the group. That's just my forefinger-in-the-air guesstimate, of course.

I haven't done it lately, but I've perused a great many blogs late at night when I was bored, clicking on hundreds of titles that just published a new post to see what they are. A few times, I've found something good. A remarkable number of times, I've found one-post blogs that had just been published for the first time. Some of them are just snotty and obscene in a teenage boy sort of way, but I guess some of them may have been snotty girls instead. Things have changed since I was a snotty boy. It's my guess that they never returned to make a second post. They just wanted to see if they could do it-make a blog-and Say Something out there on the Internet. I guess they then discovered they didn't have as much to say as when they're hollering in the movie theater and annoying the rest of the audience. I will not speculate further, but it was probably all for the best. Free Speech in the hands of the brain-dead IS one of the things Americans have fought and died for, but it's an ugly thing to behold.

I once found the blog of a fellow in his twenties (purportedly, at least) who'd just started his blog and who promised to post Every Time that he got laid and he expected to deliver "plenty". He was gay and liked it with total strangers who didn't return his kisses (that's a euphemism, kiddies), but he liked it that way. He didn't care if he himself got off or not. His notion of what constituted "satisfaction" was obviously a little on the bizarre side. His blog and his Yahoo email address had the most unimaginably vulgar names contained in them. I won't test your liberality by repeating them. Over several weeks, he wrote three graphic (mostly brief) accounts of his sex acts in public places, then (excuse the term) petered out. About a month went by without further posts, and then I stopped checking. Maybe he was in jail for a while, who knows? Though he'd been interesting in his deviant and moronic way-the way that two-headed turtles are interesting, I guess-I was relieved to find him gone.

I am also relieved that he was not a very good writer. I'd say he was just one step up from the sort of writer who leaves notes and phone numbers for you on the restroom walls. WHAT would I have done if he'd been a good writer?! Would I have kept reading him to this very day, allowing him to warp what little is left of my sense of reality? Have I no sense of goddamn decency at all?!

Well, eventually he would have annoyed me, I'm certain. Other far more civilized blog writers have annoyed me and ended up being removed in a heartbeat from my revolving list of about 20 to 25 blogs. Some are deleted, some are added-it's nature, life and death, death and life. Only it's utterly ephemeral, and almost totally meaningless. So, get out of here, go kiss somebody you'd like to kiss or run out the door and breathe some air! I'm sure you've noticed that it's gone a bit stale in here already.

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